When Clothes No Longer Make the Man

As I watched the coverage of Milan’s fall fashion week — the penultimate of a month of fashion shows that began in New York and ended in Paris last Wednesday — I thought of Giacomo Leopardi, the great Italian poet and moralist. Leopardi fancifully portrayed fashion as death’s sister. In a dialogue between the two, Fashion explains to Death what they have in common: “We both equally profit by the incessant change and destruction of things here below…” I was struck by the special relevance of Leopardi’s statement to one earthly realm in particular: the writing of fiction, where the device of disclosing the nature of character through clothes seems to be all but destroyed.

Clothes have provided fiction writers with one of their chief tools for revealing character. Consider “The Great Gatsby.” Amid all the buzz about the film this past summer, there was a great deal of attention paid to the clothes Prada designed for the movie. Strangely, however, there was barely a word about the prominent role clothes played in shaping the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel.

For nowhere is Daisy’s essential emptiness exposed more artfully — in the book, and in the movie — than when Gatsby showers her with his opulent shirts. “’They’re such beautiful shirts’ she sobbed.” In one sartorial instant, Daisy stands exposed as a cipher.

The technique of presenting character through fashion has now changed along with other modes of literary evocation. Nineteenth-century novelists like Honoré de Balzac, for example, were influenced by the pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed to be able to divine people’s characters and their level of intelligence by the shape of their heads. As biological certitudes have been exposed as superstitious fantasies, novelists’ art has evolved. Few, if any, novelists writing today would make a connection between a character’s physical appearance and his or her moral nature.

But until now, for thousands of years, the importance of clothes has been both central and stable in storytelling. We all know, from the tale of Joseph and his brothers, not to give one son a fabulous coat without at least buying some nice pants for his siblings.

In the Iliad, Homer has the fashion-plate Paris, the seducer of gorgeous Helen, wearing “the skin of a panther” on his shoulders. Call it epic chic.

The climax of King Lear’s disempowerment and humiliation is the moment when he tears off his mounds of regal clothes. “Off, off, you lendings!” he cries. His extravagant threads are the fleeting emblems of his fragile power.

On the other hand, Byron’s famous dandy, Don Juan, is entirely what he wears, his “brilliant breeches… /Of yellow casimere we may presume,/White stocking drawn uncurdled as new milk/O’er limbs whose symmetry set off the silk.” Unlike Lear, the power signified by the adventurer’s clothes is as permanent as his daring personality.

There were exceptions, and dissenters, to be sure.

Jane Austen turned up her nose at fashion as a marker of personality. In “Pride and Prejudice,” when Mrs. Bennett tries to describe for her husband the dresses Mr. Bingley’s sisters were wearing at a dance, her wise, disillusioned spouse cuts her off: “Mr. Bennett,” Austen wrote with approval, “protested against any description of finery.”

But Austen’s puncturing of the convention only proved its powerful ubiquity. A few decades later, as the rising middle class created more and more social stratifications, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary gave clothes in fiction another boost.

Emma Bovary’s character is illuminated in tailored glimpses. “She wore no fichu,” Flaubert wrote, a fashion choice that revealed “small drops of perspiration on her shoulders.” Next, she has to pick grass and weeds off her wedding dress, which is too long and trails behind her. In poor Emma’s future lie desperation and a sordid end to her illusions. We know that because her clothes tell us so.

Even the modernists, most of whom scorned realism, couldn’t dispense with clothing. In James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” after the word “peach” recurs several times as a leitmotif, Molly Bloom longs for “a peachblossom dressing jacket” in her famous soliloquy that concludes the book.

With that one reference to fashion, Joyce elevates Molly’s unpretentious desire, stamped by her eccentric romanticism, into the life-force itself.

The last fertile moment of clothes in fiction might have been postwar America, when the middle class established itself to a degree unprecedented in history. The literary use of fashion especially flourished in The New Yorker, in the stories of J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Mavis Gallant.

But a sea change has occurred. In our moment, fewer and fewer fiction writers use clothes for a deeper literary purpose. They just mention, as briefly as possible, what people happen to have on.

In his most recent novel, Junot Díaz describes a character’s change in personality by saying she “rocks new clothes.” In her latest novel, Zadie Smith gives you quick glimpses of people in “flip-flops and cargo shorts” or “loafers” or a “green bikini.”

In Chad Harbach’s “Art of Fielding,” a character wearing a “hooded Westish sweatshirt with a windbreaker on top of that” is just about as elaborate as it gets.

Of course, there are numerous counterexamples, even in these authors’ work. And there are gifted fiction writers like Jonathan Franzen and Claire Messud, who are as meticulous as any 19th-century novelist in their belief that clothes tell a tale about character and social position.

A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt” in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Gatsby is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.

Yet our contemporary novelists’ growing indifference to clothes as revelations of character is hardly a symptom of decline. What this means, I believe, is that many of our best writers are simply in sync with their time.

After all, we live amid a ceaseless torrent not just of new images, but of ones that have been computer-generated, mashed up and photoshopped. Appearances are no longer merely deceiving. They are increasingly worthless.

But most decisive for the fiction writer’s craft is the change in everyday fashion. Ever since the Gap in the ’90s, and then Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch, and now H&M, Zara, Mango and Uniqlo, clothes have become such a mix of retro, basic, high and low style, that what you wear is less and less an indication of personal taste.

Our fashion situation reflects our social and economic situation. Clothes have become more like costumes, intended more to hide than reveal who we are, or who we would like to be. An eclectic, basic, affordable style allows the super-rich to conceal their soaring exclusivity and to mimic humble circumstances, while it permits the rapidly contracting classes below them to camouflage their precarious status. The result is a place somewhere in between: a middle-class style without an actual middle class.

Call it the age of inconspicuous consumption, where the dominant style is either a preening or a self-protective understatement.

As some of our best fiction writers have grasped, in this atmosphere of concealment and masquerade, clothes have very nearly ceased to be markers of identity. Perhaps that’s why the craving for self-exposing memoirs has become even stronger than the desire for fiction. We don’t feel we really know anyone until we’ve seen them naked.

Lee Siegel is the author of, among other books, two volumes of criticism, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination,” and “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.”

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